06 April 2013

The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World

The tale of a teed-off philanthropist and the head of Bowdoin Collged, where identity politics runs wild.

ByDavid Feith

It sounds like the
setup for a bad joke: What did the Wall Street type say to the college
president on the golf course? Well, we don't know exactly—but it has
launched a saga with weighty implications for American intellectual and
civic life.

Here's what we do know: One day in the summer of 2010, Barry Mills,
the president of Bowdoin College, a respected liberal-arts school in
Brunswick, Maine, met investor and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein
for a round of golf about an hour north of campus. College presidents
spend many of their waking hours talking to potential donors. In this
case, the two men spoke about college life—especially "diversity"—and
the conversation made such an impression on President Mills that he
cited it weeks later in his convocation address to Bowdoin's freshman
class. That's where the dispute begins.

In his address, President Mills described the golf outing and said he
had been interrupted in the middle of a swing by a fellow golfer's
announcement: "I would never support Bowdoin—you are a ridiculous
liberal school that brings all the wrong students to campus for all the
wrong reasons," said the other golfer, in Mr. Mills's telling. During
Mr. Mills's next swing, he recalled, the man blasted Bowdoin's
"misplaced and misguided diversity efforts." At the end of the round,
the college president told the students, "I walked off the course in
despair."

Word of the speech soon got to Mr.
Klingenstein. Even though he hadn't been named in the Mills account, Mr.
Klingenstein took to the pages of the Claremont Review of Books to call
it nonsense: "He didn't like my views, so he turned me into a backswing
interrupting, Bowdoin-hating boor who wants to return to the segregated
days of Jim Crow."

The real story, wrote Mr. Klingenstein,
was that "I explained my disapproval of 'diversity' as it generally has
been implemented on college campuses: too much celebration of racial
and ethnic difference," coupled with "not enough celebration of our
common American identity."

For this, wrote Mr. Klingenstein, Bowdoin's president insinuated that
he was a racist. And President Mills did so, moreover, in an address
that purported to stress the need for respecting the opinions of others
across the political spectrum. "We are, in the main, a place of liberal
political persuasion," he told the students, but "we must be willing to
entertain diverse perspectives throughout our community. . . . Diversity
of ideas at all levels of the college is crucial for our credibility
and for our educational mission." Wrote Mr. Klingenstein: "Would it be
uncharitable to suggest that, in a speech calling for more sensitivity
to conservative views, he might have shown some?"

After the essay appeared, President Mills stood by his version of
events. A few months later, Mr. Klingenstein decided to do something
surprising: He commissioned researchers to examine Bowdoin's commitment
to intellectual diversity, rigorous academics and civic identity. This
week, some 18 months and hundreds of pages of documentation later, the
project is complete. Its picture of Bowdoin isn't pretty.

Funded by Mr. Klingenstein,
researchers from the National Association of Scholars studied speeches
by Bowdoin presidents and deans, formal statements of the college's
principles, official faculty reports and notes of faculty meetings,
academic course lists and syllabi, books and articles by professors, the
archive of the Bowdoin Orient newspaper and more. They analyzed the
school's history back to its founding in 1794, focusing on the past 45
years—during which, they argue, Bowdoin's character changed dramatically
for the worse.

Published Wednesday, the report demonstrates how Bowdoin has become
an intellectual monoculture dedicated above all to identity politics.

The school's ideological pillars would
likely be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to American higher
education lately. There's the obsession with race, class, gender and
sexuality as the essential forces of history and markers of political
identity. There's the dedication to "sustainability," or saving the
planet from its imminent destruction by the forces of capitalism. And
there are the paeans to "global citizenship," or loving all countries
except one's own.

The Klingenstein report nicely captures the illiberal or fallacious
aspects of this campus doctrine, but the paper's true contribution is in
recording some of its absurd manifestations at Bowdoin. For example,
the college has "no curricular requirements that center on the American
founding or the history of the nation." Even history majors aren't
required to take a single course in American history. In the History
Department, no course is devoted to American political, military,
diplomatic or intellectual history—the only ones available are organized
around some aspect of race, class, gender or sexuality.

One of the few requirements is that
Bowdoin students take a yearlong freshman seminar. Some of the 37
seminars offered this year: "Affirmative Action and U.S. Society,"
"Fictions of Freedom," "Racism," "Queer Gardens" (which "examines the
work of gay and lesbian gardeners and traces how marginal identities
find expression in specific garden spaces"), "Sexual Life of
Colonialism" and "Modern Western Prostitutes."

Regarding Bowdoin professors, the
report estimates that "four or five out of approximately 182 full-time
faculty members might be described as politically conservative." In the
2012 election cycle, 100% of faculty donations went to President Obama.
Not that any of this matters if you have ever asked around the faculty
lounge.

"A political imbalance [among faculty]
was no more significant than having an imbalance between Red Sox and
Yankee fans," sniffed Henry C.W. Laurence, a Bowdoin professor of
government, in 2004. He added that the suggestion that liberal
professors cannot fairly reflect conservative views in classroom
discussions is "intellectually bankrupt, professionally insulting and,
fortunately, wildly inaccurate."

Perhaps so. But he'd have a stronger
case if, for example, his colleague Marc Hetherington hadn't written the
same year in Bowdoin's newspaper that liberal professors outnumber
conservatives because conservatives don't "place the same emphasis on
the accumulation of knowledge that liberals do."

In publishing these and other gems,
Mr. Klingenstein and the National Association of Scholars hope to
encourage alumni and trustees to push aggressively for reforms. They
don't call for the kind of conservative affirmative action seen at the
University of Colorado, which recently created a visiting professorship
exclusively for right-wingers. Rather, Mr. Klingenstein and the NAS want
schools nationwide to stop "silent discrimination against
conservatives." Good luck.

In case you're wondering, Bowdoin's official statement on this week's
report amounted to little more than a shrug. A serious response would
begin with inviting Mr. Klingenstein to campus for a public debate with
President Mills. No golf clubs allowed.